Now Monitor Even More with NGINX and New Relic

This is a guest post from Andrey Belov, Product Engineer at Nginx, Inc. — the company behind products, solutions and services for its renowned open source software NGINX, and one of our Platform publishers. For more information, visit nginx.com.

A while ago we introduced the NGINX web server plugin for the New Relic Platform. Since then, the NGINX plugin has become the 3rd most popular plugin and we’d like to thank all of our users! We’re working hard to make the plugin even better. That’s why we’re very excited to announce that we’ve updated the plugin to include metrics from NGINX Plus, a fully-supported commercial version of our popular NGINX open source product. Among other additional features on top of our NGINX open source product, NGINX Plus brings an ability to export additional status information via JSON.

Our NGINX plugin for New Relic helps you to collect various metrics from any number of live NGINX instances, and visualize those metrics using New Relic’s powerful user interface. The end result is it helps you to more easily and better understand what’s going on with your NGINX servers and why.

One of the important metrics to monitor is the number of active client connections. This number represents how many connections are currently used to serve the actual users. Another common metric to visualize and monitor is HTTP request rate since modern HTTP allows multiple requests to use a single connection. There are other numbers to track as well, such as abnormally high values for dropped or idle connections, which may indicate your web server is under a DDoS attack or your operating system requires some extra performance tuning.

The latest version of the NGINX plugin can now be used to gather performance stats from NGINX Plus. If you’re using NGINX Plus, additional metrics related to upstream server behavior can be collected and visualized in New Relic. Extended metrics include:

- Number and current state of servers in upstream groups

- Number of active and idle keepalive connections to upstream servers

- Request and response rate with an additional breakdown by HTTP status codes

- Throughput information and more

TheNGINX plugin for New Relic has been enhanced to display metrics from NGINX Plus — please upgrade your plugin to the latest version to view these great new stats in your New Relic account.

Thanks again for using the NGINX plugin for New Relic — we wish you a happy monitoring time and no-downtime operations!